Prepaid transaction cards have seen increasing popularity as gifts, sales promotion tools, and instruments used by businesses to attract customers and build customer loyalty. These cards may be viewed historically as originating from traditional paper gift certificates offered by retail stores such as toy stores, book stores, records stores, hobby shops, etc., that acted as tender for any good or service sold by the store. Today, however, prepaid transaction cards are being offered by a much wider variety of businesses, some with a very limited retail presence. In addition, new types of prepaid transaction cards are being created for specific classes of goods and services, sometimes making the card look more like prepaid coupon for a particular good or service. Many of these goods and services have limited availability in retail stores.
The evolution of the prepaid transaction card business from its historical roots in the paper gift certificate business presents problems for the distribution of the cards. Traditionally, prepaid transaction cards sold by retailers were affiliated with the businesses of the retailer. For example, the cards sold by a retailer were often focused on products and services sold by the same retailer, in stores owned or affiliated with the retailer. Sales of the cards, and activation of prepaid transaction accounts associated with the cards, were conducted through preconfigured electronic transaction networks that could communicate with point-of-sale devices operating on the store's premises.
Unfortunately, while these transaction networks may be efficient for use with the prepaid transaction cards and accounts created and/or marketed by the retailer, they often don't support cards offered by non-affiliated businesses. This lack of support may extend to sales of the cards themselves, where a customer in one store cannot purchase a prepaid transaction card offered by another business, even when that other business complements, rather than competes with the business of the store. Thus, there is a need for expanding the cooperation of transaction processing systems to allow the purchase and use of prepaid transaction cards in a wider variety of stores and other merchant locations.
The limited cooperation among transaction processing systems and networks for transactions involving prepaid transaction accounts can also increase the costs to process these transactions. When multiple transaction processors are asked to compete for transaction processing services, the effect is almost always to see costs lowered for processing the transaction. Thus, there is a need for new systems and methods of conducting transaction involving prepaid transaction accounts that to try to expand the number of transaction processors competing to complete the transaction. These and other issues are addressed by the present invention.